Gaunt happy to tough it out

There may have been seven shots difference between Daniel Gaunt's first and second rounds at the JBWere Masters, but the tournament surprise-packet, who finds himself in the second round clubhouse lead, is just as satisfied with Friday's 72 as he was with Thursday's 65.

The notorious north wind got up over Victoria Golf Club in Melbourne's famous sandbelt on Friday morning and little more than a handful of the morning players were able to sign for sub-pars rounds as the course bared its teeth.

World No.70 Sergio Garcia was the only one to make serious inroads up the leaderboard, surging to four under on the back of a superb 65.

Gaunt, who jointly held the overnight lead at six under, said it was a vastly different course to the one he threatened to tear up on Thursday afternoon and with the wind strengthening, he was happy to be back in the clubhouse with a competitive score.

"It was pretty brutal out there today and it was phenomenal score from Sergio to be fair. That's why he is a world class player," the 31-year-old said.

"I'm extremely happy to be in and be in the position I am in. It's only going to get tougher out there with the wind, the greens are going to dry out pretty quick, which is going to make it super hard to stop the ball on the green."

"If you said at the start of the week that I was going to be leading or somewhere near it, going into the weekend, I would have put my hand up for it."

Gaunt, who is a member of Victoria Golf Club and cut his teeth on the Melbourne sandbelt before moving to the UK a decade ago, said the difficulty wasn't the strength of the wind, but the seemingly random nature of its direction.

"It (the wind) was all over the place. There were a lot more irons off tees where in the practice rounds we were hitting three woods and drivers. A par three into the wind, like 14, it was a longer club. Apart from that, it was trying to keep it under the wind," he said.

"I started off alright, got rid of the nerves earlier, I didn't play particularly good with my long irons. With the wind today, if you weren't sharp with your irons, you were going to suffer. I had to battle pretty hard today."

The toughest point of Gaunt's Friday round came at the 10th, one of only three holes where he dropped shots. The fluky breeze played havoc with his approach shot resulting in a double bogey. Instead of sitting clear of his rivals on seven-under, he will have to wait and see how the afternoon players handle the conditions.

"I had little wedge in (at 10), hit it perfect, but just as I hit it, the wind changed. We had the wind in a certain direction going into there and I thought I hit a perfect shot, the wind switched and went straight down and pushed it straight over the back. It can happy pretty quickly around here, the wind can switch on you, you can suffer pretty quickly, you have to pretty sharp," he said.

With that in mind, Gaunt, who earned his full-time European Tour card with a victory on the Challenge Tour in July, is more